“Yes, he did.”
“Well, I’m not a prince.”
“I’ll say you’re not.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You’re a—well, I don’t know what you are.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that is so.”
“Indeed?”
“Yes, indeed.”
The hot blood of the McTavishes boiled over.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Angus, “what you are.”
“What?”
“You want to know?”
“I do.”
“All right, then. You’re the girl who’s going to finish twenty-seventh in the Ladies’ Medal.”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“I’m not talking nonsense.”
“Then it’s the first time.”
“I’m talking cold sense. You know as well as I do that all this party stuff has turned you from a fine, resolute, upstanding beater of the ball to a wretched, wobbling foozler who ought never to have entered her name for so important a contest as the Ladies’ Medal. You have your little mirror with you, I presume? Gaze into it, Evangeline Brackett, and read its message. Your eye is dull and fishy, woman. Your hand trembles. You waggle your putter as if it were a cocktail shaker. And as for the way you have been playing—if I may employ the word ‘playing’—with your wooden clubs . . .”
Evangeline’s face was very cold and hard.
“Yes?” she said, “Proceed.”
“No,” replied Angus. “The subject is too painful. But I will say this: If I were you, I’d keep my wood in the bag from now on.”
It was the unforgivable insult. A sock on the jaw Evangeline Brackett might have condoned, a kick in the eye she might have overlooked, but this was too much. Now that Angus McTavish had forfeited her affection by his uncouth and sullen behaviour, there were two things only that she loved—her mother and her steel-shafted driver.
“Good morning, Mr. McTavish,” she said. “If you will kindly hand me that bag of clubs, I will not trouble you to come round with me any longer.”
A swift revulsion of feeling swept over Angus McTavish. He perceived that he had gone too far. He loved this girl, and he had hurt her.
“Evangeline!” he cried.
“My name,” said the girl, “is Brackett. A ‘Miss’ goes with it.”
“But listen,” pleaded Angus. “This is absurd. You know I worship the very tee you walk on. Are we to part like this just because that Mortimer excrescence has come into our lives? Shall our dream Paradise be shattered by a snake in the bosom—or is it grass—who is not worth a thought from either of us? If you will but reflect, you will see how right I am in regarding him as a worm and a pustule. Consider. The man yodels. He does not play golf. He . . .”
“My bag of clubs, if you please,” said Evangeline haughtily, “and look slippy with it, if you will be so good. I do not wish to remain here all day. Ah, here comes Legs. Dear old Legs! Legs, darling, will you carry for me?”
“Carry what, sweetest of your sex?”
“My clubs.”
“Oh, the jolly old hockey-knockers? Certainly, certainly, certainly.”
“Hockey-knockers!” hissed Angus in her ear. “You heard what he said! One of the finest steel-shafted, rubber-grip, self-compensating sets of clubs ever made by the Pro, and he called them hockey-knockers. I warn you, girl, have a care. Do not trust that man. Somehow, somewhere, in some manner, at some time and place, he will let you down, and with a bump. Beware!”
“Come on, Legs darling,” said Evangeline, laughing a silvery laugh. “My partner’s waiting.”
Standing there on the veranda with folded arms, Angus McTavish watched them depart. Evangeline, her face like stone, did not vouchsafe him so much as a glance over her shoulder. Cold and aloof, she made her way to the tenth tee, and Legs Mortimer, having tilted his hat to one side, put on a false moustache which he produced from an inner pocket, and danced a few steps, said “Hot dog,” shouldered the bag and followed her.
Now, it may well be (said the Oldest Member) that, listening to what I have been telling you and particularly taking into consideration the remarks of Angus McTavish during the scene which I have just described, you will have formed the impression that after her performance going out it was scarcely worth Evangeline Brackett’s while to bother to play the second nine. Having made a start like that, you probably feel, she might just as well, for all the chance she had of winning the Ladies’ Medal, have torn up her card and gone home.
But you must make allowances for the exaggeration—shall I say the imagery?—of a jealous lover still smarting from the fact of having had roller-skates put on him by his rival in the presence of the adored object, and then having been laughed at by her, first in a hyena-like and then in a silvery manner. These things distort the judgment and lend acid to the tongue. When Angus had referred so bitingly to Evangeline’s inefficiency with the wood, he had had in mind merely the circumstance of her having topped a couple of spoon shots. His remark about the putter and the cocktail shaker was based on a slight disposition on her part to fail to lay approach shots dead. The truth was that Evangeline, though perhaps five strokes in excess of what a pure-minded girl with her handicap might have expected to take on nine holes, was still well in the running. And the resentment with which she was seething as the result of her ex-fiancé’s uncouth behaviour resulted now, as resentment so often does on the golf course, in her striking a patch of positive brilliance.
The thought of Angus McTavish and those low cracks of his lent her an almost superhuman vigour. Every time she drove off the tee she did it with a sort of controlled fury, as if she were imagining that she had seen Angus McTavish standing in the middle of the fairway and that a well-directed shot would catch him on the spot where it would do him most good. When she chipped, it was as if she were chipping Angus. And whenever she made a recovery from a bunker with her niblick, she hit the ball as though it were Angus McTavish’s shin.
By these means, she was enabled to get fours on the tenth, eleventh and twelfth, a five on the thirteenth, and on the short fourteenth one of those lucky twos which, as James Braid once said to J. H. Taylor, seem like a dome of many-coloured glass to stain the white radiance of Eternity. In short, to condense the thing into cold figures, by the time she had holed out at the seventeenth, she had played a net seventy-three. And when she learned from a bystander that her only two possible rivals had each turned in net seventy-nine, she not unnaturally considered that the contest was as good as over. The eighteenth had always been a favourite hole of hers, and she was supremely confident of securing a four on it. Not even in the stress of a medal round had she the slightest apprehension of failing to be on near the pin with, at the worst her third.
In these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that she gazed at Legs Mortimer with an affection bordering on something even warmer. As was his practice when wearing a false moustache, he was waggling the ends of it, and she thought she had never seen anything so droll. How vast an improvement, she felt, not only in the capacity of a caddie but in that of a mate for life, was this sunny, light-hearted merrymaker on such a human pain in the tonsils as Angus McTavish. Going round with Angus McTavish carrying your bag, she mused, was equivalent to about four bisques to the opposition. Angus McTavish was the sort of man who, just by going about looking like a frozen asset, takes all the edge and zip out of a girl’s game. She felt that she had had a merciful escape from Angus McTavish.
“What I love about you, Legs,” she said, as they walked to the eighteenth tee, “is your wonderful sense of humour. Don’t you hate people with no sense of humour? Scotchmen, I mean, and people like that. I mean people who get stuffy if somebody plays a harmless good-natured practical joke on them. Like—well, Scotchmen, I mean.”
“Quite,” said Legs Mortimer, putting on a false nose.
“I’m sure I should be the first to laugh if anything of that sort ever happened to
me. But then, thank goodness, I have always had a sense of humour.”
“Great gift,” said Legs.
“Well, it’s just the way one happens to be born, I suppose,” said Evangeline modestly. “You either have it or you haven’t. I think I’ll have a new ball here, Legs, darling. I don’t want to make any mistake over this hole.”
The confidence which Evangeline Brackett had felt on holing out at the seventeenth had lost none of its force at this supreme moment. It seemed to inflate her as with some invisible gas as she surveyed the glistening white globe perched up on its wooden tee. Every golfer knows that sensation of power and mastery which comes when he has just played a series of holes in perfect style and is conscious that his stance is right and his wrists are right and all things working together for good. Evangeline had it now. Here was she and there was the ball, and in another moment she was going to slap it squarely in the tummy and send it a mile and a quarter. Her only fear was lest she might overdrive the green, which was a mere three hundred and eighty yards distant.
She waggled for an instant. Then, raising her club with an effortless swing, she brought it down.
And what of Angus, meanwhile? For some little time after Evangeline had left him, he stood rooted to the spot. For some little time after that, he had paced the terrace with knitted brow, reminding not a few of the members who watched him through the windows of Napoleon at St. Helena. Eventually, finding conditions rather cramped and feeling that he needed more space in which to express himself, he had gone for a walk round the links, and by one of those odd coincidences was approaching the eighteenth tee from the rear at the exact moment when Evangeline made her drive. And as he drew near his reverie was suddenly shattered by a hideous, cackling shout of laughter from the other side of the bushes which hid the tee from his view.
He stopped, frowning. Laughter on the links was a thing which always offended his sense of the reverent, and the current burst of merriment he had recognized immediately as emanating from Legs Mortimer. Nobody else’s mirth had just that quacking sound.
“Faugh!” said Angus, and was about to repeat the word, when it died on his lips, and he stood gaping. There was a sort of thudding sound as of feet spurning the turf, and then round the corner of the bushes came Legs Mortimer, cutting out an excellent pace, and after him, her face flushed, her eyes staring, Evangeline Brackett, brandishing in her hand a steel-shafted driver. She seemed to be endeavouring to brain the other, if it is possible to brain a man like Legs Mortimer.
There was very little vulgar curiosity in the composition of Angus McTavish, but what there was was sufficient to make him follow the pair at his best speed. He came up with the hunt just as Legs, apparently despairing of shaking off the girl’s challenge, dodged behind a leafy tree and, with an adroitness born, no doubt, of his Swiss mountaineering, shinned up it like a squirrel and remained there.
It was at this moment that Evangeline saw Angus.
“Oh, Angus!” she cried, and the next moment she was in his arms.
Scotch blood, it has always been my experience, makes for solid worth rather than nimbleness of wit, for a certain rugged stability of character rather than quick intuition, but even a man as Scotch as Angus McTavish was able to perceive—and that without delay—that here was a good thing which should be pushed along. He would have been the first to admit that he did not quite follow the run of the scenario, but he divined that for some reason which would doubtless be made clear at a later date the past was forgotten and Evangeline’s heart his once more. Reaching out, accordingly, he clasped her to his bosom, and for a space he remained there, hiccoughing.
“Oh, Angus!” she sobbed at length. “How right you were!”
“When?” asked Angus McTavish.
“When you warned me against that man. ‘Do not trust him,’ you said. ‘Somehow, somewhere, in some manner, at some time of place, he will let you down, and with a bump.’”
“And did he?”
“Did he not!” replied Evangeline Brackett. “I needed a five on the eighteenth to win the medal, and I asked him to get me out a new ball and do you know what he did?”
“What?”
“I’ll tell you what. He put down a s-s-s-s-s.”
Anguish robbed Evangeline of speech. There was something scarcely human in her expression, and in endeavouring to frame the last word she had sunk to the level of a soda-siphon.
Angus groped for her meaning.
“He put down what?”
“A s-s-s-s-s.”
“Sand?”
She shook her head violently.
“No, no! Not s-s-s-s-s. A s-s-s-s-s.”
“S-s-s-s-s?”
“S-s-s-s-s.”
“S-s-s-s-s?”
“A soap-ball,” said Evangeline, suddenly becoming articulate.
If he had not been holding on to the girl, Angus McTavish would have reeled—Scotch-reeled, as no doubt Legs Mortimer would have described it. If his reverent nature revolted at smilax in the club-house and laughter on the links it revolted with a far greater sensation of outraged nausea at the sight of those cakes of soap which manufacturers, dead to every decent instinct and making a mockery out of sacred things, turn out in the shape of regulation golf-balls. Many a time, going into a chemist’s shop to purchase a tube of toothpaste, he had recoiled with a hoarse cry on seeing them on the counter, to take his custom elsewhere. And until now he had always supposed that the ultimate depth possible for Humanity to reach had been reached by the perpetrators of these loathsome travesties.
And now a new low level had been hit. A man—or, rather, a creature bearing the outward semblance of a man—had teed up one of the dreadful things for a girl, a fragile, sensitive girl, to drive—not, which would have been bad enough, in some casual morning round, but at the very crisis of the Ladies’ Spring Medal Competition.
“I came down on it like a thousand of bricks,” proceeded Evangeline, quivering at the memory, “with every ounce of weight and muscle behind the shot. I thought for a moment I had broken in half. And talking,” she went on, a more cheerful note creeping into her voice, “of breaking things in half, if you wouldn’t mind, darling, just climbing that tree and handing me down its contents, I will see what can be done with this driver.”
But Angus McTavish, who had been scanning the tree closely, shook his head. It was as if he deprecated the violence at which she hinted. Gently he led her from the spot, and it was not until they were the distance of a good iron shot away that he released her and replied to the protestations which she had been uttering.
“It is quite all right, dear,” he said. “Everything is in order.”
“Everything in order?” she faced him passionately. “What do you mean?”
Angus patted her hand.
“You were a little too overwrought to observe it, no doubt,” he said, “but there was a hornets’ nest two inches above his head. I think we cannot be accused of being unduly sanguine if we assume that when he starts to . . . Ah!” said Angus, “Hark!”
Unmusical cries were ruining the peace of the spring evening.
“And look,” added Angus.
As he spoke, a form came sliding hastily down out of the tree. At a rapid pace it moved across the turf to the water beyond the eighteenth tee. It dived in and, having done so, seemed anxious to remain below the surface, for each time a head emerged from those smelly depths it went under again.
“Nature’s remedy,” said Angus.
For a long minute Evangeline Brackett stood gazing silently, with parted lips. Then she threw her head back and from those parted lips there proceeded a silvery laugh so piercing in its timbre that an old gentleman practising approach shots at the seventeenth jerked his mashie sharply and holed out from eighty yards.
Angus McTavish patted her hand fondly. He was broad-minded, and felt that there were moments when laughter on the links was permissible.
24
THERE’S ALWAYS GOLF
IT WAS THE da
y of the annual contest for the Mixed Foursomes Cup, and the Oldest Member, accompanied by the friend who was visiting him for the week-end, had strolled to the edge of the terrace to watch the first of the competitors drive off. As they came in sight of the tee the friend uttered an exclamation of astonishment, almost of awe.
“What an extraordinarily handsome woman,” he whispered.
He was alluding to the girl who had just teed up her ball and was now inspecting, with a sort of queenly dignity, the bag of clubs offered to her by her caddie—who, one felt, had he any sense of the fitness of things, not that caddies ever have, would have dropped on one knee like a medieval page in the presence of royalty.
The Oldest Member nodded.
“Yes,” he agreed. “Mrs. Plinlimmon is much admired in our little circle.”
“Her face seems oddly familiar. I have seen it before somewhere.”
“No doubt in the newspapers. As Clarice Fitch she was a good deal in the public eye.”
“Clarice Fitch? The girl who used to fly oceans and things and cross Africa on foot and what not?”
“Precisely. She is now Mrs. Ernest Plinlimmon.”
The Oldest Member’s friend eyed her thoughtfully as she took a driver from the bag.
“So that is Clarice Fitch. It must require a good deal of nerve to marry a girl like that. She reminds me of Cleopatra. What sort of fellow is her husband?”
“You see him now, going up to speak to her. The smallish man with the spectacles.”
“What! The little chap who looks like the second vice-president of something?”
“Darling,” said the small man in the spectacles.
“Yes, darling?”
“Not the driver, darling.”
“Oh, darling!”
“No, darling, You know how shaky you are with the wood, darling. Take your iron, darling.”
“Must I, darling?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Very well. You know best, darling.”
On the face of the Oldest Member’s friend, as the Sage led him back to their table, there was a look of profound amazement.
“Well,” he said, “if I hadn’t heard it with my own ears, I would never have believed it. If you had told me that a girl like that would merely coo meekly when informed that she was incapable of using her wooden clubs, I should have laughed derisively. If ever a wife had all the earmarks of being the dominant member of the firm⎯”